personal experience

www.techdirt.com

Always beware of politicans pushing legislation because of a personal experience. Declan McCullagh has the story of an astoundingly, ridiculously broad data retention bill in Hawaii that would require anyone who provides internet access to keep a detailed dossier on every website everyone who uses their service visits (tied to...

techcrunch.com

More hardware startups are looking at everyday tools that have been relatively unchanged for a long time, like the HAPIFork we saw at CES this year. Today, a new startup called Wayki is adding its innovative toothbrush design to the list of gadgets hoping to improve the lifestyle of...

techcrunch.com

Last Sep Aaron asked for help in his defense, read the reactions then and compare to now: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484— nik cubrilovic (@nikcub) January 14, 2013 Nik Cubrilovic points out that people were significantly less enraged by Aaron’s legal troubles just a few months ago. Apparently Swartz wasn’t able to make a...

gigaom.com

Even if you haven’t heard of LivePerson, chances are you’ve encountered one of its products while browsing online. It’s the company behind many of the pop-up windows offering real-time chat with a representative, as well as other forms of online customer engagement. It’s also a treasure trove of consumer data...

www.cocoanetics.com

By now it is public knowledge that there will be no in-house replacement for routing via public means of transport in iOS 6. Indeed if you hold an iOS 6 phone (that somebody maybe has left in a bar) and you try to plan a route from point A to...

www.theverge.com

Darryl Campbell of The Bygone Bureau has written a love letter to the lore found in old video game manuals. Campbell relates his personal experience of being drawn deeper into a game's universe through the supplementary manual material, and mourns the loss of similar experiences in today's increasingly digital...

venturebeat.com

This is a guest post by Rene Reinsberg, CEO and Co-Founder at Locu There has been a lot of talk lately about how the best business technology, historically only available to big corporations, has become increasingly available to small businesses. Jeremy Levine, a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, recently told me...

Comments on 'Leveling the (local) playing field: How tech can help local merchants compete in 2013':

techdirt.com

It does't look like we'll be seeing much Tweeting-from-the-bench on the Supreme Court any time soon, but the Hillicon Valley blog highlights an amusing moment at a recent House Judiciary subcommittee meeting, attended by two Supreme Court Justices -- Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer in which they're asked if they...

arstechnica.com

urban_data Here at Ars, we’ve been covering the deceptive and downright shady practice of “bill cramming” throughout the last few years. In this scheme, consumers are billed for services that they never asked for, likely ignored, and yet continue to be billed for. (Ars editor Nate Anderson detailed his...

9to5mac.com

Apple is slowly rolling out a new customer service initiative across its retail stores called ‘table selling.’ With the new strategy, Apple Store employees are assigned a product table where they are responsible for working with groups of customers with different needs, albeit the same device, according to people...

allthingsd.com

You know and I know and whoever’s in the big master control room know that we’re being watched and recorded in so many moments of our lives. Koozoo is a startup that takes that a bit further — into our own hands. The San Francisco-based company wants people to contribute...

venturebeat.com

Apple’s online store slid out of the top five in customer satisfaction while Amazon.com remains tops, according to an online retailer study by Foresee. In fact, Apple had its lowest score in four years, achieving only an 80 percent rating. Amazon.com retained its industry-leading 88 percent satisfaction score from 2011 in...

9to5mac.com

Twitter launched its new music discovery app Twitter #music for iPhone today. Twitter #music takes a step toward filling the void created when everyone migrated from MySpace, which was one of the most effective music discovery tools for me until it was largely vacated. Twitter promises to “change the...

Comments on 'Quick Review: Twitter #music for iPhone, iPod Touch is now playing':

www.theverge.com

Ashton Kutcher was one of the first celebrities to really embrace Twitter, becoming the first user to exceed one million followers back in 2009. However, there's no doubt his relationship with the service has diminished in recent years, and he admitted as such in a talk today at CTIA....

www.businessinsider.com

Future models of iPhones and iPads may use the MagSafe chargers that are currently in use on Apple's laptops, reports Patently Apple. Sure, the chargers look cool, but they serve a practical purpose too. Since they're held in place with magnets, they can disconnect without hurting your device when...

www.electronista.com

Bank of America is adding video conferencing to its automatic teller machines. The video chat facility will allow bank customers to see and speak to tellers in order to perform more advanced bank transactions than would normally be available to an ATM user, as well as providing a more personal...

www.guardian.co.uk

Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir's criticism of the singer for looking flawless at the London marathon was sheer tabloid hypocrisyJan Moir. Oh come on. I'm not sure what happiness or insight you brought into world by being so beastly to Katherine Jenkins, but do I hope you've read her dignified...

techcrunch.com

Clothing startup Everlane has opened a pop-up store in New York for the holidays. We jumped on the opportunity to talk with founder and CEO Michael Preysman right in the middle of Everlane’s clothes. With 400,000 active members, the company is certainly catching the attention of many fashion aficionados....

gigaom.com

We have all hit play to watch an internet video, only to be met with that annoying buffering wheel. You begin to debate how much longer you will wait. “Just one more second,” you tell yourself, until finally you close the window and move on to something else. Knowing this...

techcrunch.com

I’ve always describe Google’s social spine, Google+, as personal, rather than social. What that means is that it’s a service for you to connect with people you already, rather than it being all about public sharing, like Twitter, which has its place in the world. When I say personal, I...

www.readwriteweb.com

Earlier this week we examined why Zynga is shedding users, causing its stock price to almost halve from its December IPO level. Zynga rose to prominence on the back of a farming simulation social game called FarmVille. Its success spawned a series of other 'Ville' games, such as CityVille, CastleVille,...

www.readwriteweb.com

A new study gives even more credibility to the theory that engaged social media users who not only read messages, but also share them, are a brand's best friend. Elmie Nekmat's study of how social media messages change people's thinking was published in the most recent edition of the Journal...

www.insidefacebook.com

Many marketers and page owners have been decrying Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that controls who sees their posts. There have been claims that the company is manipulating the algorithm — sometimes referred to as EdgeRank — to limit the reach of page posts and force admins to buy ads to...

gigaom.com

President Obama was inaugurated a scant few weeks ago but it’s never too early to think about the next election cycle. Tech teams for the 2016 campaign will need to hone in on location-based applications and finely tuned personalization, said Michael Slaby, former CIO for Obama for America. Michael Slaby,...

gigaom.com

We have all hit play to watch an internet video, only to be met with that annoying buffering wheel. You begin to debate how much longer you will wait. “Just one more second,” you tell yourself, until finally you close the window and move on to something else. Knowing this...

thenextweb.com

There’s a big difference between a smartphone and a TV. As developers increasingly look to the opportunities of TV, they will have to shift their focus from thinking about a personal experience to a communal one – and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. The transition...

thenextweb.com

Whilst RIM is flagging in domestic and western markets, one of its jewels remains its BlackBerry Messenger service, which has slowly and surely growing to include an increasing number of social and connected BlackBerry apps. Today, the company has announced that Facebook for BlackBerry, Twitter for BlackBerry, BlackBerry Travel, its BlackBerry...

venturebeat.com

Facebook announced an official WordPress plugin today for cross-posting content, enabling tighter, cleaner, and simpler integration between millions of WordPress blogs and Facebook. All I can say is: finally! I’ve been using WordPress blogging software since before it was WordPress. Seriously. Before there was WordPress there was b2/cafelog, around 2001...

entrepreneur.venturebeat.com

(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.) I’ll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard, “chip shot”...

thenextweb.com

While we all have our favorite brands, there’s no doubt a bit of disservice that we do to ourselves when we don’t venture outside of our comfortable walls. That’s exactly the story with me, specifically related to Apple. I long ago overcame the desire to tinker, upgrade and fix my...